Jochi gazed out toward shore through a pair of digital day–night field glasses. A single low white-walled flat-roofed modular structure, the Kono Head landing station was on the windward side of the extinct volcano, probably two or three thousand feet east of its furrowed base. It would be easily within range of his nanodrones.

He let the binoculars hang from his neck and reached down to a cargo pocket, unsnapping it against his leg.

The tiny Wasp UAV he extracted was just over six inches long and weighed mere ounces. Its biomimetic wings, when unfolded, were deliberately similar to those of its namesake. So were the long aerodynamic contours of its molded plastic body. Speedy and agile, with three cameras behind the tiny pane of its eye, the drone’s low visual and acoustic signatures made it difficult for countersurveillance arrays to pick up. If detected, moreover, its shape would fool even AI-based systems into mistaking it for a flying animal.

Jochi held it between his right thumb and forefinger, clicking the wings into their open, outspread position with his opposite hand. Traveling at fifteen knots, with half an hour of flight time, it would conclude its mission and return with minutes to spare.

He raised the drone up in front of his face and activated it. Its wings fanned rapidly. It tugged and pulled and flapped. He felt little puffs of air beat against his cheeks as it tried to escape his fingertips.

“At the one,” he said into his headset.

“Yes.”

The response came from a man called Niu in the other raft’s front seat. He held a drone identical to Jochi’s in his hand.

Jochi gave the count. Both men’s fingers parted.

The Wasps leaped up into the darkness and shot off across the water toward shore.

CloudCable’s Kono Head landing station, or dry plant, was centered within a square, blacktopped parking area surrounded by wire fencing and only reachable from land over a private access road running due north toward the tuff cone. A quarter mile inland, the access road swung briefly west to skirt the base of the cone, then turned north again to intersect with a narrow, lonely public two-lane.

It was at the bay side that the cable made landfall in a section of beach marked off-limits to visitors. Snaking up from the bay through a hole drilled offshore in forty feet of water, the cable fed into a noncorrosive steel pipe and then ran straight under the beach to the station. A flapper valve at the seaward entry to this duct prevented seawater from entering the heavy galvanized pipe.